Practical anatomy: a manual of dissections / by Christopher Heath.

  • Christopher Heath
Date:
1870
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Practical anatomy: a manual of dissections / by Christopher Heath. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

    562/600 (page 552)
    The Bones are best prepared by first removing roughly all the muscles, and then by maceration or by boiling with a little lye. If they are still quite oily, they can be whitened by exposure for two or three weeks to the sun, and by steeping them for some days either in ether or in benzole. The last is very cheap and perfectly efficacious. If the head be that of a young subject from 10 to 18 years of age, the cranial cavity may be filled with dried beans or peas and put to soak, when, as the contents expand, the bones will readily separate. The bones of the hand and foot should be strung on catgut in their normal relations, one string from each toe or finger to the heel or wrist, and one or two strings crosswise. Wet Fi-eparations are usually put up in alcohol. The blood should all be soaked out first, by running water, if possible, and the fat all removed. They should then be placed in their proper position in a mixture of alcohol (1 part) and water (3 parts). In a week or ten days they may be placed in equal parts of alcohol and water and then after a time mounted in three parts of alcohol and one of water. If placed in strong alcohol at once they shrink and shrivel so that they are often absolutely worthless. This is especially true of pathological preparations. After the preparation is properly suspended, the bottle should be covered with sheet lead and then with bladder, and var- nished two or three times with copal varnish and lamp- black, or with good black sealing-wax dissolved in spirits of turpentine. Preparations from the dissecting-room, such as sections of heads, ligaments, hearts, generative organs, etc., which it is desired to preserve unmounted, should first be cleaned and dissected, and then placed in a jar or box with dilute alcohol or whiskey. Of the method recently devised by Prof. Brunetti, of Padua, I can speak very warmly, from two preparations which he kindly sent me, but at present the details of the method are only known to the author, and I can give no directions further than those already published in the medical journals. (See Med. Netvs and Library, Jan. 1868, and B7-it. Med. Journ., October 5, 186Y.) Those desiring further and fuller information on these subjects will find them best of all in Hyrtl's Handbuch der Zergliederugskunst, and also in Parson's Anato- mical Preparations, Horner's Practical Anatomy, and the Dublin Dissector.]